“Just as any good community healthcare manager should, Ignicious Bulongo has his eyes peeled for disease outbreaks from his post at the Ng'ombe Integrated HIV/TB Clinic, located in the Zambian capital.

The facility provides primary care to nearly 50,000 people, many of whom, Bulongo says, live in poverty, employed as domestic workers and bus drivers. Environmental and sanitation conditions are less than ideal, so catching disease outbreaks early on is crucial for protecting the community's health.

The 2010 introduction of the SmartCare system, an electronic health record system developed by Zambia's Ministry of Health and the U.S. Center for Disease Control, has helped make Bulongo's job easier. Instead of holding patients accountable for paper "exercise books" documenting their medical histories, the details of individuals' diagnoses and treatments can now be stored on a smart card they hold in their wallets, as well as locally at their health clinic and in the larger SmartCare network.” READ MORE

“Facebook has noticed something that other companies would do well to heed: The biggest opportunity right now isn't in smartphones, where users are bombarded by the fruits of an ever-more-competitive market for apps and mobile services. Rather, the big play for some companies, especially any that wish to expand into emerging markets, is on the "dumbphones" — aka non-smartphones or, in industry parlance, feature phones — that most people in rich countries have now left behind.

We've known for some time that Facebook's strategy for grabbing its "next billion" users is to convince them that Facebook and the web are one and the same by making access to Facebook free on every model of phone. But now Javi Olivan, head of "growth and analytics" at Facebook has dribbled out a handful of other interesting details about Facebook's strategy.” READ MORE